Before Buffy , before Twilight , before Octavia Butler's Fledgling , there was The Gilda Stories , now as a new Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special A Penguin Classic Hardcover First published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez's classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.